You want to play with both Expansions, but either you don’t have enough time to sort the cards, or you don’t want to bother sorting them. Perhaps you really have a hard time picking and choosing which ones to keep and which ones to throw away.

Is there any way to play with all the cards and buildings, without having to remove some of them?

Well let’s take a look at some numbers here:Each of the expansions has exactly 1/2 of the amount of buildings and cards of the base game. Therefore if you add only one expansion the deck consists of 2/3 Base Game and 1/3 Expansion.If you try adding both expansions you have a ratio of 1/2 Base Game and 1/4 for each of the expansions. This means that they would not come up as frequently (25% instead of 33%). Hence the reason for the rule to remove 1/2 of the base game which give a ratio of 1/3 Base Game and 1/3 per Expansion.

So why is this important? Well the corruption manipulating cards and buildings would come out less frequently, but the Undermountain cards and buildings would be mostly unaffected. However some of the Lord Cards would be affected.

Here are three lord cards that would be affected:- Sangalor: Score 4 VP for every non-mandatory Skullport Quest completed and Skullport Building controlled.- Halaster Blackcloak: same as Sangalor but for Undermountain.- The Xanathar: Score 4 VP for every corruption token in your tavern.

The simplest answer is: Remove them!Without these three lords, many of the requirements for a balanced ratio of cards are removed.

However, there are some that would prefer to not remove Lord cards from the game as each one adds an additional layer of complexity.

So how do you balance them and still account for having a smaller ratio of cards and buildings? I’ve played around with some balancing mechanics and the simplest one to use and remember, as well as being one of the better balanced options, is to have the three Lord cards score 5 VP instead of 4 VP for their Lord ability. There is only an 8% difference in the amount of cards and buildings (33% vs 25%) but the extra VP helps balance the rarity issue.

So there you have it. I realize this may not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I wanted to explore the options and come up with an alternative for people who were seeking one.

So why is this important? Well the corruption manipulating cards and buildings would come out less frequently...

This. If the quests and buildings that remove corruption could be buried so deeply in the pile that they'll never come up, corruption becomes more dangerous to take early on. Anyone who starts with a quest that removes corruption in such a situation is especially lucky, because they know from the outset that they'll be able to take corruption and get rid of it later.

Note also that Xanathar becomes more powerful rather than less with all of the cards in play. The Xanathar player can comfortably take some corruption even before seeing any cards that return corruption. If other players are more hesitant to take corruption (and rationally they ought to be) then Xanathar might even end up getting a net bonus for corruption.

Lords of Waterdeep is not so precisely a balanced game that playing with all of the cards will totally break it. But, for the same reason, changing the number on a few lord cards from +4 to +5 won't change things too much, either.

I have played this variant many, many times even before reading this as it's too much of a hassle to sort the cards and randomize them before and after games. The difference is we include The Xanathar. There doesn't seem to be any difference in the gameplay.

I saw on another thread that someone suggest to use different stacks for the decks and building i.e. one building from the base game and one for each of the expansions. For the Quests, one from each stack and one only for the Plot, but perhaps the player who reset the Quests choose from which deck he'll draw for the fourth Quest.What do you think about it ?

Are you guys doing anything special in 2-player games with all expansions in like using a dummy player to block spaces or anything else to make the game feel tighter?

We don't do much different, other than what is described by the OP (BTW, thanks for that). We have now played dozens of games with the exp's and this variant with over 90% as 2 player games. We have seen no need at all for further mods.

The only other thing we do, (and although I don't mind playing with Xanather for a good challenge), for my wife's sake, we take him out of the mix.